


Start Over

by bartycrouchjrs



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Character Study, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-02 07:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18806194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bartycrouchjrs/pseuds/bartycrouchjrs
Summary: Steve returns the infinity stones, splits his soul, and tries desperately to put himself back together.





	Start Over

It takes him a few minutes to come to. But when he finally does, blinking white powder from his eyelids, all that Steve can register is how _cold_  he is. He hears the blood rushing in his ears, the wind howling all around him like something alive, and he just feels—relief. His head aches, but his body feels so light—like all of the guilt he’s long carried about this day has vanished in the space between the train and this brutal sea of white, somewhere in those hundreds and hundreds of feet above him.

He staggers to his feet, his strength returning to him in slow undulations, and kicks around for his shield. He finds it nearly buried a short distance away from where he’d touched down before he sets off in the direction that he knows to be true—knows in the inexplicable, unfaltering way that he always does when it comes to Bucky Barnes.

“Buck!” he calls out, but the wind slices through his cry, sharp and unforgiving as vibranium, and all that Steve has to guide him is his heart.

It was never Bucky’s photograph that he kept in his compass.

He sees the sprays of red before he sees his friend. A moan peals out some moments later, anguished and guttural, and Steve cuts through the snow like a man possessed. But for all that being a soldier has hardened him, has sharpened his senses and dulled his spirits in equal measures, it could never, ever prepare him for this.

“Buck— _shitting Christ_ —Bucky,” Steve splutters, his insides twisting into knots at the sight of him. Bucky looks half out of his mind with pain, too far gone to even register that Steve is there—jaw spasming, eyes rolling back into his head, limbs sprawled out in every direction. Steve crouches down next to him and immediately has to lean over to one side to vomit. His hands drift everywhere with no real intention, desperate to do something, anything, to make it better. But Bucky’s lips are already blue as a robin’s egg—the same kind that used to sit in a makeshift nest in their fire escape, back when they were either too soft or too stupid to shoo off the birds, and Bucky would feed them the heels of their bread like he’d never heard of the Depression—and his hair is dark and matted with blood. He looks positively glacial, and it’s wrong, it’s all wrong.

Steve starts over.

————

Steve hangs onto certain moments for too long and agonizes over too many details about his life, until the events themselves become meaningless and abstract—like staring at a Seurat painting long enough that the big picture starts to fade away, and all that is left are the tiny, individual flecks of paint. It is no way to live, and yet. And yet.

————

Bruce sent him off with enough Pym particles to put all six infinity stones back, and then some. It’s less stressful, certainly, to not have to get it all right on the first try—but it also makes it a hell of a lot easier to give into his impulses. The temptation to tear at the fabric of reality and piece it back together like a quilt—until his life is just a patchwork of several timelines, of several moments, where Steve does the right things, saves the right people, splits his soul in just the right way—is simply too strong to ignore.

————

His journey ends with a plane crash—or so he’d thought.

But there it is, clawing its way to the forefront of his mind: _We don’t trade lives, Vision._ No one had ever claimed that Steve was careful with his own life. He may be as selfless as Tony is—was—brilliant, but that’s also made him the kind of man to jump on a grenade in Basic Training, and infiltrate a Hydra base to save his best friend against the Colonel’s orders, and send a ticking time-bomb into the ocean with himself in it. It’s altruism—maybe even heroism—but it’s also extraordinarily reckless, and Steve has always been reckless with his heart.

So, maybe one dance wouldn’t hurt.

He flicks his compass closed, and he starts over.

————

“Steve,” floats Peggy’s voice from across the room. She gapes at him from behind a tall stack of manila envelopes, her feet propped up on her desk and her characteristic pumps kicked to some dimly lit corner of the office, long forgotten. It’s nighttime, and she’s got the only office in the building with its lights still on; a S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on her nameplate gleams under the light of a desk lamp. Steve has always respected her work ethic; she’d worked twice as hard and was twice as capable as any man he’d ever met in the war. He supposes they’d both had chips on their shoulders, back then—back when they were both too eager to punch wisecracking assholes in the nose, size be damned, and they’d had everything in the world to prove. “You’re… alive?”

Steve’s throat constricts. “Yeah, Peg.”

“It’s really you?” she asks, disbelieving. She scrambles from her chair but doesn’t make any moves to come closer.

“In all the ways that matter,” Steve replies, quietly emotional.

Seeing her face again feels distinctly like drowning. An emotion so powerful, it forces his head beneath the surface and rips through his lungs—sloshes around behind his ribcage and waterlogs his heart. He may as well have gone down with the plane again, for all that he’s lost for breath, for words.

Steve comes up for air, and says, “I was hoping we could have that dance now.” He shifts in place, feeling five-foot-four all over again. “If you’re… not too busy, of course.”

Finally, Peggy comes around from behind her desk. She falters again once they’re finally face-to-face, reaching for him before apparently thinking better of it. She looks lost. Out of her depth.

It is not the hero’s return that Steve had foolishly expected.

“Steve,” she says slowly, “what happened to you?”

And, so, Steve explains, in halted, fumbling sentences, all that has happened to bring him to this point. He trusts that Peggy will believe him, will understand him—will guide him toward his true North, because he’s never felt so lost in his entire life, with all of these possibilities laid out before him. They’re up almost the entire night, talking of splintering realities and broken promises, of Hydra and the Winter Soldier, of Howard and Maria Stark’s son who would go on to save the world, until sunlight begins to pollute the heavy darkness outside the window.

“You’d really come back? With everything you know now?” Peggy shakes her head. “You can’t do that to yourself, Steve.”

“I could finally rest. I could be with you,” Steve says, knowing even as he says it that it’s nothing more than a fever dream. “We could…”

“Trust me, Steve; I know my worth,” Peggy interjects, her gaze soft but her words resolute, “but what I can offer you in this life is never going to be enough. The guilt would eat you alive.” She cups his face, gently, like he might shatter at one well-aimed blow. “But I think you already knew that.”

Steve’s thought long and hard about what his happy ending would look like, if he were ever to get one. It’s befitting, in a cruel sort of way, that he could cross timelines, split realities, jump between universes—and still not find it.

————

After that, it’s difficult to return to Camp Lehigh and not look for Peggy. It’s even more difficult not to search for the Winter Soldier files—for some inkling of where Bucky is, because he must be out there somewhere, if not at this very site, frozen solid in one laboratory or another.

He could kill every undercover Hydra agent in this compound in one go. Sweep the floors with their blood and rain hell down on Zola, on Pierce. At the very least, he could tuck the Space Stone into Stark’s briefcase with a cryptic message, telling him to watch his back. With his 20/20 hindsight, it would all be too easy.

But Steve couldn’t even get himself together enough to save Bucky after his fall in the Alps, and that was before Hydra even got to him. If he was going to try at all, he should have done it right—should have started at the very beginning. Even with all these second chances, Steve still can’t get it right.

He starts over, and over, and over.

————

On Asgard, Steve covertly returns the Reality Stone to Jane Foster, Thor’s first love turned the one that got away. He elects to simply leave the stone on her bedside table after he observes her tinkering with some sort of Asgardian tech and chatting with a woman who he assumes is Thor’s mother, and leaves without them knowing that he was ever there.

On his way out of the palace, Steve wonders about Mjölnir. After wielding the hammer in the fight against Thanos, Steve has wondered on more than one occasion why the enigmatic weapon had deemed him worthy—if it still would now, after everything he’s done. But he’s only recently come to terms with the fact that he is apparently the kind of man to go back in time and yank at loose threads; giving into his own morbid curiosity now would only set him two steps backward.

Except that Mjölnir doesn’t give him the luxury of ignorance. There’s a huge clap of thunder, and then several sharp cracks like a whip; it makes the hair on Steve’s arms stand at attention. The hammer soars through the sky, ripping through clouds as it goes, and crashes down to earth with all the force of a god. It comes to a sudden stop in the slope of Steve’s hand and settles there with a contented little sizzle, like it belongs there, as right as a pair of knees on a church floor.

————

The Power Stone is meant to go back with Quill on Morag. It’s a quick exchange—all that Steve has to do is slip the stone back into its resting place in the tomb before Quill gets to it first. He makes his escape just as Quill comes strolling down the path, swaying his hips from side to side and snapping his fingers, oblivious as ever.

Then, Steve hears the music.

_I come up hard, baby… I’ve been for real, baby… with the Trouble Man…_

The lyrics spill out from Quill’s radio—and regretfully also from Quill’s mouth—and Steve’s head lifts, slow, disbelieving. Realization dawns as the memory takes form— _on your left_. Sam had made sure to keep Marvin Gaye’s albums on a near-constant loop that first year they’d become friends, and it’s the same song that had been playing when Steve woke up in the hospital, after Bucky— after Bucky—

Steve’s heart sinks and swells— _Bucky_. He misses him so much he can hardly stand it. He’s been gone for too long, away from him for too long—though it’s hardly been much time at all in Bucky’s timeline. Still, he must have been worried, when Steve didn’t return in those five allotted seconds. Of course, Steve hadn’t told anyone about his plans before he left—least of all Bucky, who would have shaken him by the shoulders until his brain fell out through his ear.

The thought of his friends waiting for him back home restores Steve with a sense of urgency. He’s tired of trading mistakes with the void; the process has been unbearably lonely, and Steve thought that he was lonely _before_  all this. In trying to tie up loose ends, he’s only left himself more untethered than ever.

————

Steve starts over so many times because it’s all that he knows how to do. He falls down and gets up, again and again, like a broken record. He could do this all day, all week, all year—all his life. It is no way to live, and so. And so.

(So, drop the repeat and just rinse. Splash your face with cold water and spit into your sink. Keep on waking and waking up. Suddenly, the world is new.)

————

When Steve comes around the mountain, he isn’t expecting a familiar face.

“ _Schmidt_?!” He doesn’t gape for long, though; he reaches for his shield, going tense as a bowstring. “The _hell_  are you—”

“Well, well, if it isn’t Captain America,” drawls the Red Skull, materializing from the shadows and leering at him from beneath the shadow of his hood. “Welcome to Vormir.”

“Why are you here?” Steve demands, barely resisting the urge to rush forward and seize him by his cape.

“I guide others to a treasure that I cannot possess,” the Red Skull tells him, matter-of-fact. “It is my eternal punishment.”

“The stones are punishing you?” Steve purses his lips. “Huh. Maybe the Soul Stone has a soul after all.”

“Very funny,” the Red Skull says in a monotone. “But I assume you came here for more than just to exchange jokes.”

Steve just nods. “I’m here to return this.” The stone glows out in the open, effervescent, like it is happy to be home. “But first, I’d like something of mine back.”

The Red Skull huffs. “The Soul Stone cares not for your petty negotiations. It is guided by one mantra: _A soul for a soul_.”

“Then, if it’s truly ‘a soul for a soul,’” Steve says slowly, “returning this stone should bring her back.”

“Perhaps,” concedes the Red Skull. “I don’t pretend to understand the Soul Stone’s every whim and nuance.”

Steve steps closer, patience wearing thin. “So, can you help me or not?”

“I will take back the stone,” says the Red Skull, offering his palm to him. “What happens next is not up to me.”

“You’d better not be lying,” Steve spits out, and presses the stone into his hand with force.

The world shakes and goes dark.

————

Steve wakes not with a stone in his palm, but with another hand, smaller, tucked into his own.

He and Natasha sit up to cough the water from their lungs, but the moment they’ve both caught their breath, they’re reaching for each other. Natasha’s arms come up to wrap around his neck, and Steve feels nearly sick with relief.

“Am I really alive?” Natasha wonders aloud, disentangling herself only enough to swipe at her eyes, at her damp cheeks. Natasha has always had such a large presence in his life that Steve forgets, sometimes, absurdly, that she’s so small, and so human, until he’s reminded again in moments like these.

“I really fucking hope so,” Steve says, and they both break into ugly laughter—the kind with cracking syllables and sharp, hiccupping breaths in between.

“Did we win?” Natasha asks him, once they’ve both grown solemn again, reluctant to let go of each other.

The atmosphere burns orange and purple above them.

It’s a start, at least.

————

Natasha insists on going alone to Avengers Tower to return the Mind Stone.

“Loki doesn’t scare me,” Natasha tells him, like that thought had ever crossed Steve’s mind. But what she really means is— _the Time Stone is your problem_.

“I know,” Steve replies, all the same.

Steve knows to expect the Ancient One when he arrives at the Sanctum Sanctorum, thanks to Bruce. Her presence is striking, but not just for the fact that her head is bald; she has an air of profound wisdom about her, of absolute knowledge and impeccable insight, that should probably remind Steve of Strange, but instead reminds him of another wise man—one from his past.

“You’ve made a terrible mess, Captain Rogers,” she chastises him. Her tone is sympathetic yet scolding; her eyes bore into him, deep and unsettling.

“Yes, ma’am,” Steve says. He places the stone into her outstretched hand.

The Ancient One folds her fingers around it and tilts her head, as if seeing the stone in a new light. Then, she flicks her wrist, casting a golden sphere into thin air. “I suppose you’d like my help cleaning up.”

It isn’t a question. Steve teeters backward, eyes going wide.

“You— you mean— can you?” he asks her, stunned into monosyllables. “I mean— can it be done?”

The Ancient One doesn’t answer him, not right away. “Your friend kept his promise to me,” she says, maddeningly elusive. “And I can sense that your journey through time has been one of healing.”

“It— it has,” Steve rushes to agree, and is surprised to discover that it’s actually _true_. There’s no denying that Steve tore himself in too many directions—until his soul was in shreds and his edges were frayed—but he also managed to pick up the pieces and put himself back together. Maybe even for the better.

“The body of a soldier is content to take a beating, but the heart demands healing. Healthy hearts make good men, and the universe often rewards good men.” The Ancient One slants him a significant look. “Not perfect soldiers, but good men.”

————

When Steve and Natasha return home, they’re greeted by Sam, Bucky, and Bruce’s identical looks of incredulity.

“Miss me?” Natasha quips, just a little too raw and a little too relieved to pass as her usual brand of sarcasm. Bruce reaches her first, engulfing her in a huge but gentle hug, and Sam and Bucky follow in suit. When they finally part, giving her room to breathe, Natasha takes a step back and seems to falter. “Is Clint…?”

“He’s around,” Bruce replies, quick to rein her in and lead her toward the lake, where Clint had last been seen.

No longer content to let him be a bystander, Sam reels Steve in for a hug of his own. “Gave us all a good scare when you didn’t come back right away,” Sam says, and adds, heartfelt, “but I guess it was worth it, huh?”

“You’re damn right,” Steve says, clapping his shoulder.

Sam lets him go with a quick squeeze to his bicep and gently commandeers him toward the spot where Bucky has been standing, waiting. When Steve meets his eyes, he nearly cowers at the severe look that Bucky aims at him.

“Five years,” Bucky says meaningfully. “Five years, we were gone, we were turned to dust by some fuckin’ purple asshole, and we, I was stuck with this idiot who thinks he’s a bird—” A laugh rips out of Steve, raucous and unexpected, at the offended look on Sam’s face. “—and I never said it, but you know what? I really fucking missed you, Steve.”

Steve swings an arm around Bucky’s shoulders and pulls him in, smushing his nose into the part of Bucky’s hair. “I missed you, too,” he tells him earnestly. The sentiment is too large, too overwhelming, to possibly mean the snap alone.

After a moment, Bucky clears his throat. “I have a question for you,” he announces, his voice slightly muffled by Steve’s uniform. Steve pulls away, but only just. “And you don’t have to answer it, but if you don’t, I feel like that’s kind of an answer in itself—”

“Jesus, Bucky, _what_ ,” Steve says. The fight drains from him all at once.

Bucky slants him a shit-eating grin. “Did you pay Agent Carter a visit?”

Steve splutters, flushing hard at the insinuation, but of course Bucky knows him well enough to ask—to pack mischief into an honest question. Bucky must interpret his reaction for what it is, because he pats Steve on the cheek, syrupy sweet and patronizing. “Good for you, buddy. Good for you.” He turns to Sam with a wide smile. “You owe me five bucks.”

“Oh, go to hell,” Sam tells him primly.

Steve sighs, but he can’t fight the smile that’s pulling at his lips, threatening to split his face. “Is this going to be a thing now? Do I really have to listen to this, every day, at all hours?”

“No,” Sam says, at the precise moment that Bucky answers, “Yes.” Steve nods along, like he’d expected nothing less.

“Great. Fantastic. Can’t wait.” Steve sighs again, heavy and melodramatic, and resigns himself to a lifetime of bickering with his oldest and his newest friend. Not a fresh start, or a happy ending—but something in between. He’s lucky. He’s really fucking lucky.

And what else is there to say about Steve Rogers, really? He loses some battles—but always, always wins the war.

**Author's Note:**

> If the Russos can have plot holes in their writing, then so can I. I have a Tumblr: @bartycrouchjrs.


End file.
